Month: December 2015

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Social (Media) Security

Global Price tag of consumer cybercrime (Norton Report)

As business owners and social media users alike can attest to, cybercrime is one of the largest inherent problems that has come along with the wide prevalence of the Internet. Cybercrime has moved from an annoyance employed mostly by hobbyists, to an immeasurably large business that spans the globe, affecting economies from Russia, to South Africa, to the United States.

As a result, cyber security has gone from a recommended option to an absolutely necessary aspect of any online presence. And with more and more consumer commerce taking place online, end-users are as susceptible to cybercrime as businesses, if not moreso.

Verifying your Website on Pinterest

In an effort to combat spam, Pinterest allows you to verify your ownership of the website listed in your Pinterest Profile. Similar to Twitter’s Verified Accounts feature, Pinterest includes a visual marker on your profile to signify that you are the site owner, in this case a red checkmark. It’s a rather easy process, provided you have a few pieces of information and 10-15 minutes of time. You’ll need:

Pinterest login credentials for you or your brand

FTP login credentials for your website (more on this in a moment)

Basic knowledge of HTML files

Let’s get started!

Login to the Pinterest profile we’ll be working with, and once logged in click your name across the top navigation bar. This should take you to your settings. Scroll down until you find the entry for Website, double and triple-check to make sure the URL in the box is your website’s URL. You need to include the http:// header, but not the www. prefix.

YOUR URL SHOULD LOOK LIKE THIS: http://mywebsite.com

You should see a button next to your Website field that says ‘Verify Website’, click on that bad boy.

Download your HTML Verification File

You should be presented with this HTML verification screen. Click next to step 1 where it says Download the HTML verification file (pinterest-xxxxx.html), your HTML file should begin downloading automatically. Ensure that you do not rename the file.

Upload the HTML Verification File to Your Site

Now that we’ve downloaded the HTML verification file, we need to get it onto our site so Pinterest can see it to complete the verification. In order for Pinterest to do that, the HTML verification file needs to be located at http://yourwebsite.com/pinterest-xxxxx.html, and in order to accomplish that, we need to upload the HTML file we downloaded to the root folder of your website.

Uploading a File to Your Site’s Root Folder

Most modern web hosts have a web management interface like cPanel, allowing you to upload/download files, make configuration changes, and more. I’ll be showing you an example using cPanel, as this is the most commonly used management UI. However, the steps are largely the same for any web host, as long as you can find a File Manager/Browser within your web management interface.

This is the File Manager included with cPanel. The folder ‘public_html’ is your Root Folder.

Navigate to your ‘public_html‘ folder, and upload your verification HTML file. After you’ve completed this, return to Pinterest and click on step 3 to check the verification file and complete the process. If everything is correct, your profile should now show a red checkmark next to your site URL!